"Where Is Home" aired on December 8, 2024, and at 64 minutes it is the longest Season 1 episode before the finale. Stephen Kay directed it, from a script by Taylor Sheridan. Tommy faces the cartel man from the pilot across a field of old wells. Rebecca and Nathan work out how to settle with the families of the dead before the families find lawyers. Cooper helps Ariana sort through her husband's paperwork, and Angela redecorates the rent house on Victor's credit card and cooks a family dinner. The episode ends in a pipe yard, with Tommy on the phone to 911.
The field, and the cartel again
Tommy, Dale and Boss are looking at wells that need work. Dale wants to work the whole field over, since these wells have all been in production for 35 years or more, and Boss counts 17. Tommy phones Monty for approval. Monty tells him to do them one at a time and not to start the next until he has seen new production reports. "I don't like pressing my luck." Tommy learns that one of the fields used to be maintained by Luis's crew, which hasn't been reassigned. He asks Boss to take it on, and Boss says it is "a ways from my turf."
While they are out there a truck pulls up with the cartel man Tommy calls "Jimmy," who is named Jimenez in the captions of the pilot's opening scene. He says Tommy owes him money because "all my product burned up on the side of my road." Tommy has the lease in his head. "It's part of the lease, and we have deeded access to it. It's not your road till the lease expires." Nothing in it gives them the right to land a plane there. He lists who is now looking at the site, the sheriff, the FAA and the NTSB, and tells the man the DEA has a satellite over the field. The man answers with pressure of his own: "I got a boss too, and he lost millions on my road. He wants it back. Maybe some of these wells stop working." Tommy tells him that if wells start blowing up, the Army's 1st Cavalry Division will be running war games in the field within a month, and suggests he buy his own plane and build his own runway. "Yeah, well, because then you can trace the plane back to me," the man says, and has the last word: "You stick to drilling wells. You don't know anything about my business. But you're about to learn."
Afterward Dale asks whether the DEA really has a satellite over the field. "Hell no, Dale," Tommy says, and admits he made it up. Dale has been filming the exchange. Boss says it is a real problem, and that none of his crew will set foot on the field until Tommy fixes it. Tommy calls Monty and tells him it is something they have to discuss in person, and that he will come to Fort Worth to see him.
Monty at the meeting
Monty gets a scene of his own, at an industry meeting where a colleague is presenting a lobbying plan. Bob works through figures on electricity, exports and regulation, and says, "Energy consumption is not a social issue." Steve answers, "It's deeply social." Monty ends the argument: "This is why I don't come to these things. Y'all have been in so many shareholder meetings, you forgot what it is we actually do for a living. We are well diggers." He says the industry can't control what its product is used for, and that he doesn't care what California's governor says about electric vehicles. "I care that the price of oil stays between $76 and $88 a barrel." It is a narrower version of the band Tommy described to Rebecca in the last episode, oil "above 60 but below 90," with $78 "about perfect." A colleague warns him in return: "your children are going to inherit an oil fortune, but your grandchildren won't." And, "I know the party's not ending tomorrow, but it is ending."
Settling with the families
Rebecca comes to the rent house to meet Nathan, whose office is also the house. "M-Tex doesn't have an office in town?" Nathan explains that it has remote offices that move with the rigs and satellite offices at the man camps, "but I promise, you would find those more inappropriate." Then the two of them go through the numbers. "Three widows, eight dependents. Youngest is three months." The proposal is "250 per household, plus a college fund." One of them asks whether that includes the cash value of the families' 401(k)s. It doesn't, and the families are entitled to those regardless of a settlement. "They don't know that." "Do they have attorneys?" "Not to my knowledge." "We're gonna make this deal before they get them."
They rule out going to the insurance company. "The insurance company isn't gonna offer them anything. They're going to investigate for a year, claim it was negligence on the part of the employees and then wash their hands of it." The plan is an escalation: "If they don't bite at 250, we will offer 300. If they don't bite there, 400." They will present it to the families the next morning and leave each house with a check on the table and a signature on the settlement. Compare it with how Tommy described the same payment in episode 2: "A gift, just to get 'em through."
Cooper and Ariana
Ariana has asked Cooper to come over and help her with the paperwork. "When someone dies, it is tears and meals and then a funeral. And then the business of death. Elvio did all the papers. None of it makes sense to me." He reads through the mortgage, $1,347 a month, and the car insurance, $325. She has $17,000 in one account, which he says will cover the bills for about six months. Her first thought is to sell the house. He tells her that would just trade a mortgage for rent, and suggests selling the truck instead. "It's paid for," she says. He tells her he'll find out about Elvio's 401(k).
Their conversation is the most tender in the episode. Ariana is nursing the baby, and when Cooper says he didn't know she could drink a beer while doing it, she tells him one helps her produce more milk. He is embarrassed, he says, because he is younger than she is, "In life." "Your baby's the first baby I've ever been around... Your husband's the first person I knew who died. And here I am, thinking I'm a man." He tells her that his grandmother said that in her heart she would always be 17, and that the trick to life "is enduring all the loss and pain of this place, but stay 17 in your heart." When he offers to mow the front yard, Ariana says, "Front yard's for the neighbors to look at. Backyard's for me." He mows it anyway. "I don't know how else to help."
Manuel pulls up and accuses Cooper of playing husband, and Ariana tells him what Cooper has actually done: mowed the lawn, weeded the garden, helped organize Elvio's bills and build a budget. "How many times have you come by to help, huh?" She asks where the dead man's friends are. Cooper tells Manuel, "That's the second time you've pointed a gun at me. Third time's gonna be the last." "You're goddamn right it is," Manuel says, and drives off, telling him he will see him tomorrow.
Later Ariana apologizes for kissing him. What upset her, she says, was the insult of Manuel doing nothing to help and then asking who does. She tells Cooper what makes him different from the people around her. Her friends give her advice ("Get a job. Sell the house. Move home. Find a man."), and he doesn't. "You listen." When he says he has to go to a family dinner, she gives him a warning: "Don't ever miss a family dinner, Cooper. 'Cause one of them will be the last. Could even be this one."
Angela's dinner
Angela has spent the day redecorating. The rent house has been emptied of its old furniture, the walls have been painted, and the bill has gone on Victor's credit card. Tommy asks if she put "a hundred grand" on it. "Two hundred and twenty." Her argument is that she needs the house to feel like a home if they are going to live in it, and she reminds him that he has been in Midland "Thirty-three years." His answer is that they are there to work. "Midland's not home to any of us."
The dinner is funny and cruel by turns. Angela has found a butcher that imports wild boar from Italy for a Bolognese, and Tommy calls it spaghetti. Her blessing thanks God for "Dale and Neal," and someone corrects her: "Nathan. Nate." Tommy can't drink wine. "Because I'm an alcoholic." Angela asks when they stopped fermenting beer, and he says it's low-alcohol beer. Asked about their days, Nathan invokes attorney-client privilege, and Dale gives his: a hundred-degree day staring at gauges, until "some cartel members showed up and demanded we pay 'em back for the drugs they lost on our lease to the tune of about $30 million dollars." Dale insists it really happened, and Tommy says he is going to see Monty tomorrow. After a fight over the decorating, Tommy follows Angela into the kitchen and it ends in tears and laughing, over the word "spaghetti."
The pipe yard
Ariana calls Cooper late at night, scared. "Every car that drives by. Every creak this house makes." He asks about the big dog, and she says Elvio got it to watch over them while he was working. "There's not a boogeyman in the world that wants to mess with that dog." In the morning Tommy is heading to Fort Worth to see Monty, and Angela decides to ride along. She wants to tell Victor face to face. Tommy says he would rather she just called him, and she says it feels like cheating. "Well, hell, it is cheating, honey. It's been cheating."
On the way, Rick calls from a pipe yard where a delivery has been stacked wrong, with six-, eight- and ten-inch pipe bundled together. Tommy stops. He tells Angela to stay in the truck, because of the cranes and excavators, and that she would need a hard hat and steel-toe boots. Then Rick is crushed under the pipe. Someone shouts that moving it will make him bleed out. Tommy stays with him, gives him a phone to call his wife, and answers the question he asks. "What do I tell her?" "Tell her you love her." When the call isn't answered, Tommy takes Angela's phone and calls 911, describing "a white male, in his 30s, and his body's been crushed." The dispatcher asks if he is breathing. "No, ma'am." She asks about CPR. "It's not possible to give him CPR."
The settlement playbook, in order
The kitchen-table scene between Rebecca and Nathan is a complete legal strategy delivered in about two minutes, and the show trusts the audience to keep up. Laid out in order, it goes like this.
First, size the claim: "Three widows, eight dependents. Youngest is three months." Second, price it at a number that reads as generous rather than calculated, "250 per household, plus a college fund," with the tuition funded out of investment returns rather than cash. Third, keep the families' own money out of the offer. The 401(k) balances are theirs regardless, so folding them in would make the offer look larger without costing M-Tex anything. "They don't know that." "Their attorney will." Fourth, move before the lawyers do: "Do they have attorneys?" "Not to my knowledge." "We're gonna make this deal before they get them." Fifth, keep the insurer out, because an insurer, as Rebecca puts it, is "going to investigate for a year, claim it was negligence on the part of the employees and then wash their hands of it." Sixth, have the ladder ready, 250 then 300 then 400, and go door to door with a check on the table and a signature line beside it.
What makes this more than cynicism is a piece of Texas law the show never mentions. Texas is the only state where a private employer can legally decline workers' compensation insurance, and in the oil field that choice is common. An employer who opts out becomes what the state calls a non-subscriber, and it loses the protections that comp normally buys. There is no exclusive-remedy bar, so the family can sue in tort, and under Texas Labor Code section 406.033 the employer cannot argue contributory negligence, assumption of risk, or that a fellow employee caused it. Those three defences are exactly the arguments M-Tex would otherwise be making about a man who hit a rusted valve with a wrench.
The show does not say which side of that line M-Tex sits on. But the urgency of every scene about the settlement only makes sense on the non-subscriber side, which is also why Rebecca warned Tommy back in episode 2 about a nine-figure lawsuit rather than a capped benefit schedule. Our guide to oilfield insurance and liability walks through how the two systems differ.
Set the playbook next to how Tommy described the same money in episode 2, and the distance is the point. "A gift, just to get 'em through."
Odds and ends
- The industry meeting Monty walks out of is populated by real companies. The captions and cast list identify the other men at the table as the CEOs of Valero Energy and Marathon Oil, alongside a character named Bob Knowles, played by Colin Ferguson.
- The man killed in the pipe yard is Rick, played by Adam Stephenson. Tommy's instruction to him, "Tell her you love her," is the only advice he gives all episode that costs nothing.
- Ainsley meets a girl named Shelby, who invites her to a patch party the next night. "We go out to the oil wells, and bring kegs, and circle up the cars on the pad and, I don't know, just dance and blow off some steam."
- The eight dependents in the settlement plan match the count Tommy gave Cooper in episode 2: "Eight orphans."
- Boss asks if he can come to dinner. "I mean, I don't want to eat. I just want to sit in the corner and watch her." Someone tells him he can, because "We can use all the witnesses we can get."
- Angela's movers empty the house into the front yard, and Nathan has one instruction for them: "Don't touch the files."
Where episode 6 picks up
The episode stops with Rick's injury, with Tommy holding a phone in a pipe yard while Angela waits in the truck, still on his way to tell Monty that the cartel has come for him. Episode 6 follows.